The experience of recent travellers, and particularly of Livingstone and Stanley, had demonstrated the truth of what had hitherto always been disbelieved, viz., that it was possible for the white man to live and maintain his health in Central Africa. This fact alone was of vast importance; but when was added to it proof that the country was fertile, with immense natural sources of wealth, needing only the brain and hand of civilised man to tap them, a prosperous future for the country was assured. England, France, and Portugal, but notably England, had already claimed large sections of Africa for their own, and Italy and Germany—especially Germany—were feverishly anxious to follow suit. But it is doubtful if among all the students of the African problem—and they numbered among them the ablest of every nation—there was at this period another man with prescience to foresee, as we now know King Leopold must have foreseen, the illimitable possibilities of Central Africa. Indeed it is tolerably certain that had the great nations realised the potential value of this region, their cupidity would never have permitted them to allow its sovereignty to become vested in any single individual with claim to it based upon anything except irresistible material force. King Leopold’s claim, as we have already partly seen, and as will presently be fully demonstrated, had for its foundation a long-cherished and active philanthropic interest in the welfare of its natives, chiefly in the form of the suppression of slavery; the expenditure, out of his Majesty’s private purse, of large sums of money for exploration, establishment of route stations, etc.; and generally for calling the attention of the civilised world to a little-known and less-cared-for region commonly thought to be worthless. [Illustration: The Congo at Lokandu.] Bacon asserts, in his _Advancement of Learning_, that “States are great engines moving slowly,” and from the beginning of the world until long past the English philosopher’s time, the axiom was true; but we of the twentieth century inhabit a world as unlike the world that Bacon lived in as modern New York is unlike the city that Washington Irving described under that name. The teeming millions of Europe are ever more and more perplexed by the problem of how to live, and not a day passes but the cruel competition of life waxes fiercer and hotter. New lands, new markets, _must_ be found—the social pressure in the older nations demands it as a prime necessity. Therefore comes it that States are no longer “engines moving slowly.” On the contrary, they move very rapidly; and as all the fat lands of the earth have already been appropriated, future trouble seems not improbable. John Bull, early in the field, worked hard painting the map red, and now it is not possible to get far away from one or other of his frontiers. The British colossus has many imitators; but these started in the game late, when most of the prizes had been won.